I had a fair number of people asking me how I made the borg arm for my Vriska cosplay, so I went ahead and made this tutorial thing. Here's to hoping that people find it useful! Now, I know that this tutorial is very poorly arranged, so if you've got any questions, fire away and I'll answer as best I can. And if you do anything with this, I'd be thrilled to take a look at it!

I used a couple of tutorials for this myself, specifically Anniina85's stocking arm tutorial and Amethyst Angel's plastic automail tutorial.

EDIT: Oh man, this thing is so full of typos. I'm gonna have to fix those at some point.

Yeah, the templates are a little iffy- I use different ones these days. I'll upload my new ones eventually, but until I do, it's just these ones, I'm afraid. If they're too small, you can always adjust the image scale.

Yeah, you can absolutely make just the glove- in fact, Anniina85's tutorial is all about making the glove on its own. I added armor onto mine because I wanted it to look more 3-D and robotic, but the armor definitely doesn't have to be connected to the glove. Anniina's tutorial is below. : )

I actually meant like without the whole arm bit and just up to just past the wrist? Like with the armor and all If yknow what I mean?But the link you gave is actually something I've been looking for to make the base so thank you

So, you want to have the hand armored, but not the rest of the arm? You could totally do that. None of the armor pieces are connected to the other armor pieces; they're just Velcroed onto the glove. So if you want to make just a handplate and fingerplates, that definitely won't hurt anything. Well, the handplate itself is attached to all the fingerplates, but other than that none of the armor pieces are attached to eachother.

Sorry I misunderstood you the first time around. Glad you found the link helpful, at least. xD Let me know if you have any other questions!

Yeah, but I understand what you mean. I'll just follow along and see how it goes. But that's fine the help is greatly appreciated, if I do come across with anything else I'll be sure to ask. Thank you so much

Sorry for the late reply! The forearm piece and handplate are attached to the sock with self-adhesive Velcro strips, and the bicep piece is tight enough that it stays in place on its own. In this picture I just have the armsock safety-pinned to my shirt to keep it from slipping down, but these days I use an elastic harness of sorts instead.

I'm glad it looks useful to you, haha. It's a pretty simple process, yeah, but it can be rather time-consuming and tedious (especially when you're working on the fingerplates and the glove.)You're very welcome! If you have any questions or anything, feel free to ask me. : )

Hi! This is a great tutorial, I'm just confused a8out a couple of things. I'm doing a Vriska cosplay for Halloween and my friend is doing Fem!Eridan. I was wondering if you could just clarify some stuff for me. 1- I'm a tad confused 8y the positioning and cutting of the foam pieces. 2- I also don't really understand the shoulder plate part. 3- I don't particularly get how you attach the hand pieces to the glove and such. Thank you! Sorry I'm so confused a8out everything!!!! :::: )

Hey there! No worries; this tutorial is kinda convoluted and hard to understand. I'm happy to help as best I can. Feel free to ask more questions if these answers don't help you. : )

1. Can you be more specific about what part of the cutting/positioning confuses you? I don't know exactly what's confusing you right now, so I don't know how to help.

2. Oh man, I have no idea how to explain the shoulderplate. It's basically just two banana-shaped pieces of foam. You glue both of the left points together, then bend the pieces at an angle and glue the right points together. If you do it right you end up with a curving two-layer piece like the one I made. I really can't explain it better than that; I'm sorry! On the bright side, you really only need the shoulderpiece if you're planning on going jacketless. If you're wearing the jacket, nobody will be able to tell if you're wearing the piece or not. I almost never wear my shoulderpiece.

3. The armored pieces are attached to the glove with adhesive-backed velcro. This makes it so that you can detach and reattach the armored portions of the robot arm as desired, which makes putting the arm on a LOT easier than if you just glued the armor into place. First I put on the fabric part of the glove. Next I stuck two pieces of velcro together so I had a velcro sandwich, with the hooks and the loops meeting in the middle and the adhesive backs facing out. Then I placed one adhesive side of the sandwich against the inside face (the side that would go against my arm) of the handplate. From there, I just put the handplate into place on the back of my hand, so that the remaining sticky side of the velcro sandwich would adhere to the fabric glove. Then I just carefully pulled the foam piece off, so that one half of the velcro sandwich was on the foam and the other half was on the glove. After that I took the glove off and reinforced the velcro by sewing around the edges.

Okay, thank you so much! Sorry I wasn't very clear. I think I'm mainly confused a8out how the foam parts (other than the hand) are attached and stuff, and also when you were talking a8out the forearm piece. I don't really understand what you meant when you said to like, cut it, and then tape it 8ack together, and then some other stuff? I don't know, sorry. I'm a little 8it confused on what I'm actually confused a8out. Thank you for the help, though!

Ah, now I think I might see where you're coming from. I'll do my best to explain. The forearm piece is made in two separate pieces. Later you connect the two pieces with a strap, so that you can open and close the piece around your forearm like a clamshell. If it were made all in one piece, you wouldn't be able to get it on- your hand would get stuck in the wrist opening and the foam would tear. I learned that from experience. xD What you do is trace the forearm template onto a sheet of foam and cut it out. Once you have the general shape cut out, you chop it in half along the dotted line, leaving you with two distinct pieces. Then you have to tape the two pieces back together along the dotted line, so that the silhouette of the piece is the same as it was before you cut it in half. What you're doing here is basically making a hinge out of tape. You should be able to open and close the two pieces like a book. Then you just thermoform the piece around your forearm. I know it seems weird to cut the foam in half and then basically undo your cut, but it's actually a lot easier to thermoform the piece into the desired clamshell shape when the hinge mechanism is already in place. Once the piece has been thermoformed you can replace the tape with ribbon or a foam strap or something- it just has to be long enough that you can wrap it all the way around the forearm piece and snap the clamshell into the 'closed' position. The strap should be enough to keep the forearm piece on your arm, but it's still a good idea to add velcro tabs (like on the handplate) for further staying power. The bicep piece is loose enough that you can just slip it on over your arm and scoot it into position, but snug enough that it stays put without velcro. The shoulderpiece, if you make it, isn't attached to the fabric part of the glove at all- you glue safety pins to it and then pin it onto the sleeve of your shirt once the rest of the arm is on.

And on the Mod Podge front (sorry, just barely noticed that comment), I do NOT recommend using Mod Podge as a sealant for the foam. See, Mod Podge is really brittle once it dries, which means that if you happen to bump into something with the arm or bend a piece the wrong way, the paint layer will crack and look ugly. If you have absolutely nothing else you can use as a sealant (Plasti-Dip or fabric glue would also work if you can't get rubber cement) then go ahead and use the Mod Podge, but you'll have to be really gentle with the pieces to prevent cracking.

I have otakon in like 4 days. So this is kinda urgent. What should I use if I don't have lacquer? I have rust oleum clear enamel. I also thought about sealing smaller pieces with nail polish. I kinda did this in a rush and don't have everything.

Gah, sorry for the late reply! I've been out of town the past few days. The clear enamel should be fine; just test it out on a piece of scrap foam before you use it on the main arm, because I've heard that certain enamels will actually melt foam. Nail polish would probably also do fine. I've never really tried it with anything but lacquer, so I really don't know what else will work. Sorry that I'm not much help!

Fantastic - thanks for letting me know. I'm doing a lot of planning and I really think I'm going to give it a full blown go this weekend. If it works out, I'll send you photos :3 I'm excited about trying my hand. And very glad that the character wears fingerless gloves as the hand part of a cybernetic arm looks like it would be the hardest. I'm going to try to do the fingertips with sculpey to give them some weight/hard texture.

No problem! Yeah, the hand part is kind of a pain, especially the bit that goes over the palm- and it renders your hand pretty much immobile to boot. xD Fingerless gloves to the rescue! Hmm, Sculpey fingertips... I tried to do that too, but they kept cracking and turning out weird and lumpy, so I ended up just making the squishy foam ones. Hopefully you have better luck with yours than I did with mine, haha.

I would love to see pictures! I haven't yet seen any Bucky arms made with this method, so it'll be interesting to see how it works out for you.

I did it! @.@araniaart.tumblr.com/post/9258…I made a lot of changes to accomodate the different arm style (smooth surface, shinier rather than distressed metal, etc) - but your tutorial REALLY came in useful with the foam, the glue mixture, and just the confidence to try this overall Thank you so much!

Well, congratulations! This project is a pretty massive undertaking, so go you for doing it in a single weekend. I'm impressed. Hhrnfhdnfngh, it turned out great. Seriously, awesome job- definitely the best Winter Soldier arm I've seen anywhere. I'm simply tickled pink that you found the tutorial helpful, and that you used it to such great effect. So you are very, very welcome. also I'm totally going to reblog your pics later, but I'm on vacation right now and tumblr mobile is really buggy.

^_____^ Thank you SO much for the kind words! It means a ton coming from you, and I really couldn't have done it without your tutorial and quick answers! It was a long weekend, but a fun one X3 ((And reblogs would be aweeesome! I don't have a lot of followers lol<3 Enjoy your vacation! ))

I've started working with the sculpey - I have two fingers that turned out how I like - the other three after baking are either too tight and don't fit as far down over the fingers, or are just thicker in general. But I think another attempt or two and I'll have a set that I like I think I'm going to sacrifice mobility in the last digits of my fingers, though. At least it's going to be my left hand. I've thought about making it in two pieces kind of like your finger joints, maybe securing them somehow to silver gloves underneath, but I'm (a) not sure what would glue sculpey to gloves successfully, and (b) kind of like the sleeker look.... we'll see. This is a big learning process for me. *Crosses fingers* I'm really looking forward to working on it this weekend - after I finish my RL workstuff for the week X3 I